A bestselling author introduces us to 28 famous English novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Brick Lane. Sebastian Faulks is passionate about his form; yet his book is actually an adjunct to a "landmark series on BBC2". Even the most eloquent novels cannot easily stand alone in a visual age.

Faulks on Fiction romps through novels, providing plot summaries based on chosen characters. Avoiding anxiety about what a "character" is or about treating literary fictions as real (and rather modern) human beings, Faulks categorises into heroes, villains, snobs and lovers. These he calls "living people created in the minds of others"; he will, as it were, act as a midwife to them, for us.

This isn't an appropriate metaphor, I fear, since Faulks on Fiction is a manly book. Jane Austen is appreciated, but the ironist Austen has usually found favour with robust male critics who retreat from the "woman's novel". Doris Lessing is far less to Faulks's taste – the heroine of The Golden Notebook is so muddled she might have been created by an anti-feminist campaigner, he suggests – and he despises what he calls the "Hampstead novel" of the 1970s with its sanctimonious women and one-dimensional men. He scorns feminist criticism and pays no attention to recently excavated female writers such as Aphra Behn, stoutly declaring Defoe the first British novelist. He chooses some female authors from recent times – Monica Ali and Zoë Heller – but from the 19th century omits Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. He has heard that students nowadays don't have the patience to read Middlemarch, although surely even an impatient student might manage The Mill on the Floss.

One can always quibble about choice. When he likes a writer, Faulks's enthusiasm is infectious. Sometimes he assumes his subject's style: Martin Amis's John Self becomes "our representative at the feeding trough of the me-decade, at the bacchanal of the material appetites". He shares the literary fan's endearing habit of updating or imagining beyond the novel. The squire Tom Jones at 50 bores his wife Sophie; Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp might work in finance, while her less cool-headed husband could enter an investment bank. The habit spills over into cheeky renderings of classics: Mr Darcy's "foul mood is intensified by the dawning recognition that he will not be able to have sex" with Elizabeth Bennet. This last comes from the most eccentric of Faulks's (in the main) convincing readings. Owing perhaps more to Colin Firth's scowling image than to Austen, his Darcy is so enervated he can, vampire-like, live only through others. He tries to stop Jane marrying Bingley because the latter provides much-needed vitality; when he loses access to this antidepressant, he turns to Elizabeth, who gives "some déclassé sexual satisfaction, the human form of Prozac". Faulks is bemused at the power which the rude and gloomy Darcy exercises over women readers. "It may be difficult for some of us to understand." (This is not the only time he speaks for men; when he addresses women it is usually about sex: repeated rhythmic penetration is what some women like best, he declares, however "unpalatable to a certain feminist turn of mind".)

Faulks would like reprints of his book to be called Novel People. This would be less good than the alliterative Faulks on Fiction. He was, he tells us, urged to upfront himself, and in the course of his book we learn a lot about young Sebastian and grownup Faulks. As a child he watched the Olivier/ Oberon film of Wuthering Heights on a black and white television; he had a father who told him that he knew a man with a monkey's paw instead of a right hand and that only a cad kept billiard chalk in his waistcoat pocket. He read Agatha Christie before encountering Lawrence and Dickens; at 12 he read Ian Fleming, at 14 tackled an Orwell short story and Pride and Prejudice; as a student in Paris he encountered Nineteen Eighty-Four; at 17 he wrote well on Tom Jones without having read it. He cried over Tess of the d'Urbervilles – who didn't? – but he also cried over Emma, a less usual reaction.

The grownup Faulks is uncomfortable with sex scenes on screen but not in books; he goes to parties in London and Winchester and converses with grand financiers and MI6 officers; as a famous novelist on tour he is irritated by ignorant fans, including even Vince Cable, who cannot grasp the concept of fiction; one woman insists his aunt must have been in an asylum because he wrote Human Traces about psychiatry. Repeatedly he laments that journalistic criticism – and consequently benighted readers – have become woefully biographical.

This is a book to dip into: there's repetition which should have been edited out and the method can become tedious. A popularising work, it often distorts, frequently says elegantly what was often thought, and sometimes jolts the reader into new perception. If you want to investigate the novel's generic distinction from romance or consider how this once despised form became so ethically central to the nation, then this isn't for you. But, if you want to jog through the portrait gallery of fiction with an amiable, stimulating, often sexist, sometimes patronising companion, then it could be your "loo-side book" (to use Faulks's phrase). In the introduction he declares that "the characters who appear in the following pages are still alive to me"; at his best he makes them alive for us too.

Janet Todd's Death & the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle is published by Profile.